More evidence that the way we interact with “text” is changing. To combine and paraphrase something I’ve heard David Warlick say more than once with something Jason Ohler says:

We need to stop paper training our students. We should spend less time training our students how to use paper, and more time helping them use digital tools to interact in meaningful and productive ways with the media forms of the day.

Note that this is additive – no one is suggesting that words don’t matter, that what we traditionally think of as “writing” is no longer important, but that the very nature of composition is more complex now, and that our instruction, our pedagogy, our learning spaces need to reflect that.

. . . Writing (composing) is no longer exclusively a solitary activity. And we need to expand our definition of composition beyond only text and beyond only a specific medium (book, research paper, academic journal).

“Text” is changing. Is your classroom?

I would add: Text is changing. Is your library?

This speaks to me on so many levels. Core curriculum in LIS will shift to more of an emphasis on media creation and consumption as well as classification in a time when the new issue of Time may be delivered wirelessly to the device of the moment. I’m reminded of something my colleague Warren Cheetham said in Australia about new formats and new media: “Staff are wondering: where does the barcode go??”

I have no idea what will happen. Watch the Apple tablet hype machine in the next few months and monitor the endless supply of new stories about the death of old meadia – if the rumours are true, the video above could be closer to fact than to fiction.

3 thoughts on “View it any way you’d like…”

Journalism schools have been teaching courses in ‘convergent journalism’ for a while. The basic idea is that a good journalist should no longer be focused on a specific medium (such as print, radio, or television), but be able to work interchangeably in *all* media. The traditional media formats are probably not going to vanish completely, but they will change in response to the new ones, which means that journalists will need new skills for the new environment.

I’ve been wondering for a while if we need be more conscious of the need to have ‘convergent librarians’ who have the same mix of flexible skills, which seems to be part of what you’re talking about here.